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CRITICAL NOTICE
The Undiscovered WittgensteinThe Twentieth Century’s Most Misunderstood Philosopher
John W. Cook, Humanity Books, New York 2005, pp 437, £ 39.50ISBN-1-59102-257-6
Reviewed by Derek A. McDougall
Grammar tells what kind of object anything is (Theology as grammar).
This is Investigations § 373. In § 371 we are told that ‘Essence is expressed by grammar’,
and in § 374 a claim is made that has by now become familiar from the secondary literature,
that ‘The great difficulty here is not to represent the matter as if there were something one
couldn’t do. As if there really were an object from which I derive its description, but I were
unable to show it to anyone.....’ This, in Wittgenstein’s terms, would be a picture, and the
advice he gives is to yield to the picture whilst investigating how it might be applied.
The sort of thing one couldn’t do is represented in philosophy, for example, by the claim
that one could never have direct access to the thoughts and feelings of persons other than one’s
self ; and Wittgenstein proposes that whether one either could have or could not have this kind
of access is a confusion. This is the picture that has no application. Yet, insofar as the picture of
others having thoughts and feelings in the way that I have is ordinarily no more than a harmless
accompaniment of the practice of attributing sensations to ourselves and to others, it is performing
no useful role within the practice. Wittgenstein’s insight is to adopt a methodological standpoint
from which what would formerly have been assumed to be a philosophical implication of ordinary
discourse, becomes a picture incidental to our mastery of a technique within a practice.
Consequently, if the grammar of sensation language is expressed within the practice of
talking about our own feelings and those of others, then the distinction between the private
and the public, the inner and the outer, or the mental and the physical, gains its sense through
the application it acquires within the practice. The reality of what is private as distinct from
what is public, is revealed through the use these terms ordinarily have ; and the conclusion1
to be drawn from this is that any interminable philosophical doubt expressed in wholly general
terms, is totally idle, because it arises outwith the contexts in which ordinary questions may be
asked about the thoughts and feelings of individuals on specific occasions. Philosophical doubt
of this kind results from being misled by a picture which, in a philosophical context, comes to
encapsulate what it only appears to mean to attribute thoughts and feelings to others.
It is hardly surprising that if we read what Wittgenstein is saying in the Investigations in
this light, then some of the things John Cook wishes to attribute to him about ‘other minds’ or the
‘privacy’ of sensations can seem entirely unobjectionable; yet there are philosophical standpoints
Cook attributes to Wittgenstein which are entirely at odds with this presentation. Here is one
passage, about Kohler’s view that the perceptual event, recording observed behaviour, contains a
man’s excitement, in which Cook may appear to capture Wittgenstein’s outlook:
Then, commenting on the word Kohler used to illustrate his point
- the word ‘excitement’, Wittgenstein said: ‘The misconception [is]
that this word means something internal as well as something external.
And if anyone denies that [the word means something internal], he is
misinterpreted as denying inner excitement.’
Had Wittgenstein finished this thought he might have said: ‘In denying
that “excitement” means something internal as well as something external,
I am rejecting the picture of the inner and the outer ; I am not denying the
existence of anything.’ (1)
Cook ends with a reference to Wittgenstein’s earlier comment (2) that ‘In general I do not
surmise fear in him - I see it. I do not feel that I am deducing the probable existence of something
inside from something outside.’ Feeling excitement is expressed in one’s behaviour, although Cook’s
Wittgenstein - as we shall see - is really denying the existence of a kind of private, inner object even
in the course of enumerating all the different accompaniments, e.g. palpitations, tingles and flushes
that uncontroversially accompany the feeling. In elaborating on his thought that Wittgenstein would
2
have claimed not to be denying the existence of anything, Cook is prepared to go even further in
suggesting that Wittgenstein does not intend to be in conflict with what we would ordinarily say:
To be fair to Wittgenstein, we must not think that he was objecting
to the actual use of the word ‘inner’, as in the phrase ‘his inner turmoil’,
meaning the conflicted feelings he doesn’t talk about (or seldom allows
others to see), which stands in contrast with, for example, ‘He wears his
heart on his sleeve’. (3)
Because there is this constant ambivalence arising from what one might be inclined to say
about these matters in a philosophical context, and the philosophical implications that may or may
not be understood to follow from what is ordinarily said, it is hardly surprising that Cook can often
make claims which seem not at all tendentious. Speaking, for example, of Wittgenstein’s remark in
his 1931 Lectures that behaviourism must be able to distinguish between real and simulated
toothache, Cook goes on to claim:
His solution was to say that the criterion for a man’s having a toothache
is that he behaves in a certain manner in certain circumstances and saying,
in addition, that there is nothing like a complete list of such circumstances....
Wittgenstein insisted that because he denied that ‘he has toothache’ can be
defined in terms of behavior plus circumstances, he was not a behaviorist. (4)
Whatever variations may have occurred between 1931 and 1951, say - and Cook would
argue that Wittgenstein remained a verificationist - the view that the circumstances surrounding a
person’s behaviour in a public context, supply the criteria under which we can correctly describe
him as suffering from toothache on a particular occasion, is unobjectionable : this background does
contribute to our understanding of the meaning of the claim that he is experiencing toothache. The
grammar of the concept of toothache is revealed by showing in this way how the term is used.
The significant point is that there is nowhere else to look in order to grasp the meaning of the term.
3
This, however, is not the conclusion that Cook wishes to draw from his apparently
innocent description of Wittgenstein’s account of toothache, for he goes on to argue that what
Wittgenstein is saying cannot avoid the imputation of behaviourism:
This is surely tendentious, for he most assuredly did not allow that
a man’s toothache is something over and above - or in addition to - his
behavior and circumstances......a philosopher does not escape being
a reductionist.....simply by declaring that certain words or phrases
cannot be defined in terms of certain other words or phrases, for in
order to escape being a reductionist a philosopher must not accept
the same ontology as a full-fledged reductionist, and by that test
Wittgenstein was clearly a behaviorist. (5)
But that a man’s toothache should be anything over and above his behaviour in the
appropriate circumstances which supply the background against which we come to understand
the concept of toothache, is precisely the misleading picture telling us in philosophy that there is
an application for the kind of metaphysical ontology which Wittgenstein repudiated ; and which is
evidently crucial to Cook’s argument. If these circumstances contribute towards the meaning of
the claim that toothache is being experienced, quite independently of the pictures which may or
may not accompany our grasp of the use of the concept, there is no scope for Cook’s ontology.
Repeating his claim in a later footnote, Cook quotes a reply made by C.D. Broad to a remark by
Wittgenstein that one cannot believe something for which there can be no verification:
Apparently, Broad said something like this: ‘you cannot know
what I am feeling - whether I have toothache, for example, but
you cannot deny that if I tell you I have toothache you will pity
me, but - and this is my point - you couldn’t pity me for suffering
if you did not not believe I am suffering. So here is an example of
your believing something that you cannot verify.’ (6) 4
But all that this need be taken to show is that Broad shares with Cook the conviction
that in a philosophical context one’s understanding of what it is for a person other than one’s self
to have toothache consists in being party to a metaphysical viewpoint implying the existence of
a private experience with an appropriate ontological status; and this is the very picture which
Wittgenstein is at pains to renounce. Certainly, as Wittgenstein’s views evolved, it is open to
question whether at earlier stages of their development he would have expressed them with this
level of sophistication ; but if Cora Diamond is correct in thinking that even in the Tractatus he
believed that becoming acquainted with Bismarck’s toothache is not a matter of reaching out
beyond what can be experienced, and if he held an intermediate view to the effect that Bismarck’s
having toothache is a matter of his behaving as Wittgenstein would behave in appropriate
circumstances, (7) then a move is certainly being made towards a sophisticated interpretation
which, in locating our understanding of what it is to attribute sensations and feelings to others
within the judgements made within a social practice, finally dispenses altogether with a dubious
commitment to either the existence or non-existence of metaphysical objects. Cook, on the other
hand, takes Wittgenstein to reify these objects, whilst rejecting them on verificationist grounds.
This has the consequence that the evidence Cook often advances for his behaviourist
interpretation, if looked at from another perspective, becomes instead evidence for Wittgenstein’s
claim that he is rejecting both behaviourism and dualism as the consequence of an adherence
to a misleading picture. Cook quotes Kenny as an example of the kind of approach that simply
cannot be right:
Wittgenstein uses the concept of criterion especially to clarify
certain problems in the philosophy of mind. Most commonly,
in the Investigations, a criterion is an observable phenomenon
which is, by logical necessity, evidence for a mental state or
process which is not itself observable. (8)
5
Although it is highly unlikely that Kenny would still hold to this rather naive
view - naive because with its dubious talk of ‘logical necessity’ and of unobservable processes,
it appears to betray a commitment to the very metaphysical objects either whose existence or
non-existence Wittgenstein wishes to renounce - Cook claims that if an inner process has an
outer behavioural criterion, then it cannot be right (metaphysically) to say that the so-called
‘inner’ process is itself anything other than ‘outer’ :
Kenny says that Wittgenstein’s concept of a criterion does
not make him a behaviorist. But in fact the whole point of
his introducing the concept of criteria was to allow him to
be a behaviorist while rejecting the kind of reductionism he
had subscribed to in the Tractatus. It allowed him, that is, to
remain a behaviorist while dropping the idea that a word such
as ‘pain’ or ‘worried’ is definable in terms of behavior alone. (9)
But if we combine what is correct in both the approaches of Kenny and Cook,
we can reach the sound conclusion that our understanding of the application of a concept
like pain, and so an appreciation of the grammar of the concept, rests not on the results of
metaphysical reflection, but on a mastery of the concept within the practice of attributing pain
to one’s self and to others; and part of that mastery involves an acquaintance with the criteria
employed to determine when others are in pain. From this perspective, far from introducing
traditional dichotomies involving the opposition of ontological categories of the kinds that are
presupposed in Cook’s account, the distinctions between what is inner and what is outer,
private and public, mental and physical, gain their meanings from these ordinary applications
within the context of the social practice. Once again, what has traditionally been taken to be
an accepted and unquestioned philosophical commitment of ordinary discourse about chairs
and tables, or the thoughts and feelings of others, becomes on Wittgenstein’s reading nothing
more than a commitment that we are inclined to make when doing philosophy to a wholly
6
misleading picture which is no more than an incidental accompaniment to our participation in
the practice of talking about chairs and tables or the thoughts and feelings of others.
The significant feature of Cook’s presentation, then, is not so much that he fails to
appreciate that Wittgenstein can be interpreted in this way. It is rather that everything that he
does say about Wittgenstein’s adherence to neutral monism, behaviourism and verificationism,
begins with the same basic components from which this presentation can be derived. Yet by
retaining an adherence to the traditional ontological categories that Wittgenstein repudiates, Cook
avoids any recognition of the radical way in which Wittgenstein can be seen to be turning the
investigation around. Quoting from The Blue Book, Cook finds that ‘the common-sense man’,
ignorant of all philosophy, is not a realist:
The point is that realists maintain that the commonsense man
holds various philosophical beliefs that cannot be verified because
they are beliefs about things that are not given in experience, such
as beliefs about another person’s mind or a table on the far side of
one’s sense-data. So the issue, as Wittgenstein saw it, was over the
proper interpretation of various things that are said in the common
affairs of life. (10)
So far, this is a fair assessment of how what we ordinarily say is related to the
philosophical problems with which Wittgenstein grappled, and in itself does not necessarily lead
to the assessment that Cook gives of Wittgenstein’s approach to these problems ; for this
assessment has Wittgenstein accepting Cook’s terms of the debate, whereas he actually says in
the passage to which Cook refers, not that the common sense man is not a realist, but that he is
as far from realism as from idealism. Yet Cook has Wittgenstein making a philosophical proposal:
And phenomenalism (including phenomenalistic idealism) is one
answer to that. It declares that the propositions of ordinary language
are not about things that transcend experience, they are about what
7
is given in immediate experience. And what proves that this is so?
It is proved by the fact that on a realist interpretation those things
we allegedly say could not be verified and so would be perfectly
meaningless. Or, turning the matter around, if we ask what proves
that the phenomenalist interpretation is correct, Wittgenstein’s
answer would be that it is proved by the fact that we can verify
(have criteria for) the things we say in ordinary language about
other people and ‘external’ objects. (11)
This point arises again and again throughout Cook’s presentation. Rejecting
M. & J. Hintikka’s claim that, a propos of § 293, the beetle in the box does not disappear
except when we try to speak of it outwith a public framework, so that on their view
Wittgenstein rejects a Cartesian semantics but not a Cartesian metaphysics, Cook argues that
Wittgenstein denied the existence of the private objects underlying the Hintikka’s account. (12)
It is for this reason, according to Cook, that Wittgenstein believes his neutral monism to be
capable of doing all the work required. The point surfaces again in a later section in which he
returns to The Beetle in The Box (§ 293), where, according to Cook, commentators....
..............fail to realise that the beetles in the boxes are the analogue
not for sensations but only for sensations as dualists (mistakenly)
conceive of them. Because commentators have failed to realise this,
they imagine that the beetle-in-the-box passage is confirmation
that Wittgenstein held sensations to be private, which then leads to
disputes over what he meant by saying that ‘the object drops out’.
On the one hand, there are those who take Wittgenstein to be saying
that we all have private sensations, (beetles in our boxes), but can’t talk
about them ; on the other hand there are those who take him to be saying
8
................we can, and do talk about them, (but we do not name
them by means of private ostensive definitions). This disagreement,
however, would not arise if it were recognised that Wittgenstein was
a neutral monist, for it would be understood that the premise of the
beetle-in the-box argument, namely, that sensations are private, is not
one that Wittgenstein himself accepted. So both parties to this dispute
are mistaken; neither interpretation captures Wittgenstein’s meaning. (13)
But, of course, if we take Wittgenstein to be repudiating the metaphysical theses that
there either are or are not private objects in the sense espoused by Cook, so that the very notion
of privacy which is a common feature of our attribution of sensations to ourselves and to
others becomes a function of the role of the grammar of sensation language within the social
practice, then we have an entirely new way of interpreting these passages that points the
investigation in a different direction. We can then also recognise in what respects Cook has
already to hand the components underlying this approach even in the course of adhering to
traditional oppositions involving those distinctions between ontological categories, inner / outer,
private / public, that are central to his attribution to Wittgenstein of the philosophical standpoint
of neutral monism. On the interpretation given here, Wittgenstein most certainly would not
have regarded himself as being party to a commitment of this kind. In this respect, the view
to be extracted from the Investigations is at the very least a suble refinement of anything to be
found in The Blue Book, and certainly advances considerably on some of the earlier passages
Cook is often given to cite, indicating a development in his ideas from 1929 onwards that Cook
refuses to allow.
Readers who have followed Cook’s re-orientation in his interpretation of
Wittgenstein as presented in what has now become a total of three volumes - a fourth is
currently in preparation - (14) will be familiar with the factors which have served to lead
him towards a reading diametrically opposed to what he took for granted in earlier papers
like ‘Human Beings’ and ‘Wittgenstein on Privacy’ (15) both of which date from the 1960’s. 9
The re-orientation is radical in the extreme, and for Cook himself is a matter of more than
merely academic interest:
Some years ago, upon realising that in my attempts to defend
Wittgenstein’s philosophy I had been cheating both myself and
my students, I took his advice and quit.
In the intervening years I have gradually come to recognise the
depth of the ruts in which my thinking had been stuck and how
naive I had been in defending Wittgenstein’s views. The chapters
that follow reflect some of what I have learned while climbing out
of my ruts. I offer them here in the hope that they might help to
liberate others as the writing of them helped me. (16)
For those who are familiar with Cook’s first two books, however, it is difficult to
see his latest work as a self-contained expression of his ideas, for it is impossible not to bring
to bear an awareness of some of the viewpoints expressed in the earlier works, including the
all-important chapters on Wittgenstein’s Behaviourism, Following a Rule and the Private
Language Argument in Wittgenstein’s Metaphysics. These help to explain why he adopts such
an obviously conventional verificationist reading of § 258 and § 270, (17) and such an extreme
view of the impossibility of a solitary speaker, regarding language as a logical impossibility for
Wittgenstein in the absence of several individuals, (18) with the consequence that there could
not be someone keeping a diary in isolation after the extinction of the rest of the human race.
These questionable standpoints have to be balanced, though, by his useful distinction between
the three types of Ordinary Language Philosophy presented in Wittgenstein, Empiricism and
Language - Standard, Metaphysical and Investigative - and his presentation of Moore as someone
who espoused a common sense metaphysics in which there really are physical objects beyond
people’s sense data, and other minds behind their bodies, (19) a viewpoint which reveals how
far removed Moore’s outlook genuinely is from any that can even remotely be ascribed to 10
Wittgenstein.
Of even more significance to the understanding of Cook’s new vision, however, is
his rejection of seven myths to which he believes many commentators are committed: that
the Tractatus shows no interest in epistemology, that its simples were not objects of experience,
that the objects of the Tractatus could not be identified with sense-data, that after his return to
philosophy in 1929 Wittgenstein developed an entirely new philosophy in opposition to the
Tractatus, one that showed considerable sympathy with the work of G.E. Moore, and which for
this reason justifies us in regarding him as an ordinary language philosopher in a generally
recognised sense; and, lastly, that he was a truly original thinker of unparallelled importance,
instead of the fairly common empiricist Cook takes him to be.
These seven myths which Cook takes to be commonly accepted in the secondary
literature, are listed in the Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Metaphysics, and since the issues they
raise turn to a large extent on matters of fairly straightforward scholarship, it will be pretty
obvious to most readers how, at least as they concern the Tractatus, his claims might be met.
The remaining charges are of a different order, since the general tendency would be to side
with Cook rather than against him except perhaps in his overall estimation of Wittgenstein’s
status as a philosopher. It would not, however, be appropriate to pursue these questions in
more detail here because it is more important to understand both how Cook has come to adopt
the standpoint he does, and how we can perhaps obtain a better understanding of Wittgenstein
by attempting to see in what way Cook already has to hand the ingredients which might have
led him to adopt the kind of outlook on the Investigations which can be used as a tool to show
that his avowedly metaphysical perspective on Wittgenstein’s work is hardly compulsory.
The fact that Cook does approach Wittgenstein with these kinds of presuppositions
helps to explain how his readings of certain passages simply fail to engage with Wittgenstein’s
method. Take, for example, the 11 pages he devotes to an account of Wittgenstein on James
and the well-known remark ‘The word is on the tip of my tongue’. (20) This is intended to be11
a discussion employing the methods of Cook’s Investigative Ordinary Language approach along
the lines of his mentor Frank Ebersole. According to Cook, Wittgenstein, once again failing to
provide a proper account of the ordinary use of words, gives a behaviourist analysis of this
phrase which denies James’s obviously true claim that what is at stake here is the kind of daily
experience all too familiar to us. Suppose, for example, I claim that the word is on the tip of my
tongue yet it simply fails to arrive no matter how hard I try to recollect it. Then, on Cook’s
view, Wittgenstein would unjustifiably conclude that the word had never been on the tip of my
tongue, because if there genuinely is an experience of having a word on the tip of one’s tongue,
then one could not possibly be wrong about it. Given, however, that one can be mistaken in
saying that the word is on the tip of one’s tongue, it follows according to Wittgenstein that this
phrase cannot designate an experience. But, on the contrary, as Cook argues:
.....we use the phrase on the tip of my tongue when we can’t find
the word but feel ourselves to be on the verge of pronouncing it. It
feels as if the desired word is forming in my mouth.
That after all if why we speak of the word being on the tip of
our tongue and not in our throat or our belly !
So Wittgenstein is simply wrong when he claims that we aren’t
alluding to an experience when we say, ‘The word is on the tip
of my tongue.’ (21)
Cook contrasts this with the kind of example in which he would unhesitatingly
come up with the right word immediately on being asked to do so because in this kind of case it
does not feel as though the word is tantalisingly near at hand. (22) But what does Wittgenstein
actually say? Simply that talking about a word being on the tip of one’s tongue is just a way of
saying that ‘the word which belongs here has escaped me, but I hope to find it soon’. (23) In
short, talking about what is on the tip of one’s tongue is a metaphor, a figure of speech that seems
12
to vividly capture the feelings that may accompany the kinds of circumstances in which one is at
a loss to find the right word although it seems ‘tantalisingly near at hand’. These circumstances
for Wittgenstein incorporate special kinds of behaviour and characteristic experiences, but in
themselves are are not the meaning of ‘the correct word has escaped me, but I hope to find it
soon’. The issue here is not then one of giving either an experiential or a behavioural account of
the phrase in question. That is why Wittgenstein rounds off his discussion by commenting that
frequently the word does come to hand, although sometimes it may not. But what would it
mean if the word that was ‘on the tip of my tongue’ never came ? The phrase is not meant to
issue a prediction, as Cook takes Wittgenstein to suggest, since its failure to be fulfilled would
then imply that it was wrong to use the phrase to begin with. So for Cook this example is
yet a further expression of Wittgenstein’s phenomenalism, the denial of mental mechanisms
underlying the final recollection of a word blurted out (24), so that there is nothing behind the
blurting. Yet if one looks closely at what Wittgenstein is actually doing, it would be much more
appropriate to say instead that he is really in the business of questioning the presuppositions
that underlie Cook’s criticisms.
Cook continues to question Wittgenstein in chapters beginning with one attributing
to him a form of conceptual relativism, but the difference in their methodology comes to a head
in chapter 9 of this group in which Cook asks whether there can be objective scientific truths.
Here almost everything that Cook claims, can be regarded as a failure to engage with the terms
of On Certainty § 105 (25), and the relevance of the role Wittgenstein grants to a system as the
background to our thinking in scientific contexts. For some readers, Cook’s reflections on this
issue may seem to reach extraordinary levels of misunderstanding, with his usual claim about
Wittgenstein’s adherence to neutral monism serving to provide the focus for his further remark
that, contrary to what Wittgenstein thinks, Science is not a groundless language-game. But on
any reasonable interpretation, this is a clear misrepresentation of Wittgenstein’s intentions in
13
14
talking about ‘The groundlessness of our believing’ in On Certainty § 166:
I am not sure what Wittgenstein is here suggesting about science,
but this much is clear: He is saying that we have, without a decisively
good reason, chosen to play the cause-and-effect language-game. What
I am not clear about is this: If, as Wittgenstein claims, science is ‘groundless’,
how are we to understand that steel bridges get built, medicines developed,
disease-resistant strains of wheat produced, and that we have at our
disposal all manner of technological achievements (electric lights,
automobiles, airplanes etc.) ? I do not see how to take seriously the idea
that science is merely some sort of ‘world picture.’ (26)
The irony here is that this comes very close to expressing those superstitions about the
role of science that Wittgenstein wishes to renounce. Certainly, Wittgenstein was not without
his own prejudices. We may, for example, find rather amusing both his remark to Drury that
‘Music came to a full stop with Brahms; and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the sound of
machinery’, and the following revelation on the same page that on looking at portraits of
Russell, Freud and Einstein which he compared to portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and
Chopin, he reflected on ‘the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the
course of only a hundred years’. (27) At the opposite extreme to his apparently anti-scientific
bias, he may also appear to adhere to a questionable art for art’s sake aestheticism in his
favourable reference to the blinding of the architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral by Ivan the Terrible
in order to prevent him from designing anything more beautiful, a remark from which Drury
recoiled with horror (28). Yet in spite of Cook’s claim that Wittgenstein regarded the scientific
world view as an aberration, and of his remarks about being out of step with the civilisation
of his time, this was not, and indeed could not have been an aversion to science per se (29).
Taking a hint from Cook and investing in the kind of ordinary example which he
is often prone to produce, the important point at issue here can be illustrated if one imagines
consulting a volume about British wild birds, in order to find out what materials the crow uses
to build its nest: it is made from twigs and branches mixed in with pieces of bone, etc. and lined
with wool, hair and grass. What one would never expect to read is that because of the ready
availability of new synthetic materials, and the shortage of traditional wood, crows have lately
decided to make their future nests from pieces of foamed polystyrene. This, however, would not
rule out the possibility that if traditional materials really did become scarce, and polystyrene
were prevalent in the environment, some crow somewhere might very well use a piece of it in
the course of building a nest, to be copied in the course of time by others, so that after a suitable
period it might come to pass that crows in general were constructing their nests primarily from
this material.
A relevant comparison for the purpose of grasping Cook’s argument, would allow that whilst
there is no objection, say, to the suggestion that manufacturers have decided to use polystyrene
rather than paper for packaging in view of cost benefits - since this makes sense within our system -
we would never expect to be told, even in a children’s textbook about the history of mankind, that
although in the beginning our ancestors used magic and ritual to placate the gods in the course of
pursuing their ends, they soon decided on rational grounds that the use of some form of scientific
method was far more efficacious in obtaining their required results.
But this is the argument Cook actually uses when, in the course of objecting to
Wittgenstein’s approach, he instances South Sea Islanders described by Thomas Gladwin, who,
under the tutelage of one of their great navigators, Winin, came to discover that their existing
system of supernatural beliefs with its magical rites was performing no useful role whatsoever
in the pursuance of their aims and purposes, with the consequence that the tribe was glad to be
released from an adherence to what were no more than old and burdensome practices:
Here we see that preliterate people are quite capable of putting their
magical practices to the test and concluding that their faith in these
practices had been misplaced. In other words, this episode shows that
magic is not some ‘system of thinking’ from which people cannot escape 15
by rational means. Winin and his compatriots did not abandon
their old beliefs simply as the result of ‘persuasion’, as Wittgenstein’s
account would suggest. On the contrary, they put to a test their
belief in the need for magic and concluded on their own that they
had been wrong all along. (30)
But this interpretation of the natives’ behaviour depends on the assumption that
they are already prepared to adhere to supernatural beliefs and magical practices only if
those beliefs and practices play a genuine role in achieving their ends ; and this would for
Wittgenstein undoubtedly tend to suggest that whatever genuinely expressive role their
traditional rites may have played in their society before the arrival of the missionaries, had
already been lost to them before Winan supplied the final coup. The idea that the natives
are inherently rational beings who try out magical rites or scientific procedures to see if they
work before deciding on one or the other is one that for Wittgenstein would have made no
sense. The reason for this, once again, is that all confirmation and disconfirmation can only
take place within a system. Consequently if the belief of the natives in the power of the gods
is not functioning in any particular case as a genuinely verifiable hypothesis, as it certainly
is not in those cases where nothing can be taken, experimentally, to show the belief to be
false, then we are naturally given to conclude that their beliefs can never change. The reason
for this is that there is nothing within their belief-system which could serve to support the
radical alteration in their approach that would be required to completely alter their world-
view. Short of the intervention of a genius like Winan who forges a new way of looking at
things, or of the persuasion by the colonists referred to by Wittgenstein, the system itself, as
distinct from beliefs formed inside it, cannot be rationally subject to alteration from within.
Cook, however, is diametrically opposed to this idea because it smacks to him
of a fundamental irrationalism, a point he reiterates with his mention of Albert Mhaori Kiki,
who was brought up to believe that illness was caused by witches, but who nevertheless
16
discovered on going to medical college that, by putting his old ideas directly to a test, a proper
scientific explanation of disease in terms of the operation of bacteria and viruses leaves no role
for witchcraft to perform:
Was his change of mind the result of mere persuasion?
Did he exchange one ‘groundless world picture’ for another?
No. he rejected a traditional belief for which there was no
evidence and embraced an empirically grounded understanding
of disease that enables doctors to effectively treat people’s illnesses. (31)
But this surely begs the question, when Albert Kiki’s change of direction can
clearly be put down, not to his having altered one inappropriate belief on rational grounds
for another, but to his having been persuaded to look at matters in an entirely new light.
Indeed, for Wittgenstein, it could not be put down to anything else, since for him belief in
witchcraft could not have been intended to be a form of verifiable hypothesis when its actual
role in the lives of the natives, however it is accounted for, allows it only to redescribe the
nature of the phenomena that require to be explained. But Cook completely disagrees:
The cultures in which Kiki and Winin grew up were not
cultures in which there was no understanding of cause
and effect or of putting beliefs to a test. In fact, preliterate
peoples have a great wealth of practical causal knowledge.
That they also have magical beliefs is not surprising in view
of the many forces of nature.....which they do not understand
and over which they have no control. But the fact that magical
beliefs reside in people who also have practical causal knowledge
makes it understandable that they will, given the right circumstances,
abandon those beliefs. (32)
17
But they are in no position to abandon them unless the circumstances to which Cook
refers involve their having been induced to undertake an entirely new way of looking at things,
which on Wittgenstein’s view their existing framework per se precludes. Cook’s fear of a slide into
irrationalism is given a final expression in his thought that if, for Wittgenstein, the scientific
language-game incorporates the rule that ‘every event has a cause’, and if rules are in the final
analysis man-made, then instead of being grounded in the nature of reality, so that scientists do
inquire after causes because there are causes, we will instead be forced to conclude that playing
the scientific language game is purely optional, so that it need not even be played at all:
Wittgenstein makes it look as though there might be
people who.........would not recognise anything as a good
reason - a decisive reason - for abandoning their traditional
beliefs. But this is not the case. So Wittgenstein’s way of
representing this matter is quite unfounded. Moreover, it
leads to spurious philosophical ideas about science being
a ‘world picture’ and about the groundlessness of belief.
In an age where superstition still holds sway over many minds
such ideas can only be harmful. (33)
But Cook’s justification for acting as the guardian of reason against the tyranny of unreason
on our behalf is totally unfounded. Wittgenstein would understand the objectivity of science to be
a function of the aims and methods of science as we understand them to be fulfilled through our
participation in those procedures that we take to be integral to the practice of science, like carrying
out an experiment, testing a hypothesis, or making a calculation in the course of confirming the
validity of a theory. It is through these procedures, after all, that we come to realise the building of
his steel bridges, the development of his medicines, and of his disease-resistant strains of wheat.
Once again, there is nowhere else in which to find the objectivity of science that Cook feels caused to
glorify, for to ground it in his nature of reality is to think ‘that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s 18
nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at
it’ (Investigations § 114). Cook’s failure to come to terms with Wittgenstein’s approach reveals that
he has once again become party to a picture in which he takes the objectivity of science to consist.
But Wittgenstein’s reply is that this picture has no application because it is being viewed in isolation
from scientific practice. It is in this sense that the stable background against which scientific
procedures take place is itself a function of the practice of science, a practice which has no ground
except insofar as confirmation and disconfirmation occurs within a system, a system operating
against the background of ‘the groundlessness of our believing’ in § 166 of On Certainty. (34)
Cook’s discussion of objective scientific truths extends into his treatment of
Wittgenstein’s view of primitive practices, where the ‘instrumentalist’ views of eminent social
anthropologist Evans-Pritchard are contrasted with the ‘emotivist’ view of Wittgenstein and
Peter Winch, with James George Frazer playing a role in the background as the expositor of
a standpoint now superceded in modern research. Wittgenstein is portrayed as having been in
certain respects justified in his criticism of Frazer, to be corrected in turn by Beattie with his view
that magic is both symbolic and expressive. Insofar as the discussion at this point has all the
appearance of a debate in social anthropology, it ceases to have much philosophical interest until
Cook points out that magic is resorted to only when people who normally have control over
matters involving cause and effect, find themselves in situations where their lack of knowledge
renders them helpless in the face of adversity. This, of course, is already pointing towards Cook’s
previous claim that magic is practiced only because it is intended to achieve results, encouraging
him to once again beg the question against Wittgenstein by asking why, if it were not intended to
achieve results, it was eventually abandoned in the face of scientific evidence ? (35)
What Cook does miss in this section, however, is any sense of the importance for
Wittgenstein of the quite inexplicable horror of the scene in which, say, an effigy is thrown into a
fire. The point is not that nothing could in principle serve to explain this reaction. It is rather that
in these circumstances any explanation is totally beside the point. In the same way, a mother who 19
asks in despair why her son has died, is not given succour by being told the results of a post
mortem examination ; just as the inexplicable horror of a scene in which crowds of people are shown
being led unknowingly to their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, would not normally be
relieved in any way by the claim that this process followed ineluctably from their failure to meet
racial stereotypes set by those who adhered to the Myth of the Aryan Superman. Certainly, in
pointing to the irrelevance of any kind of causal or historical explanation in cases where our reaction
is paramount to his thinking, Wittgenstein may also be taking it for granted that this reaction is
universal amongst mankind, when that may not in fact be the case. Cook on Wittgenstein on
primitive ritual, whilst in some respects a continuation of his earlier debate on issues relevant
to the notion of the groundlessness of our believing in On Certainty, fails to engage with one of
Wittgenstein’s central concerns, even if that concern is at some remove from the philosophical
questions that also enter into the discussion. The presuppositions about Wittgenstein’s adherence
to neutral monism that underlie Cook’s presentation, continue to colour his interpretation in these
sections, as they do when he provides his more in-depth study of Wittgenstein on religious belief.
Yet in these final chapters the quality of his argument is more impressive overall, although
at least some of the problems that preoccupy him result from failing to make certain distinctions
which, had they been introduced, would have allowed for a more balanced appraisal of the issues
tackled. Here is Cook riding what in this context quickly becomes his favourite hobby-horse:
What, then, do orthodox Christians believe? And how does one
find out?...........One must ask them or listen to them praying,
reciting their creeds, and so on. But if one does this, one hears
nothing like what Wittgenstein’s account leads one to expect.
Orthodox Christians say they believe in supernatural beings
and miraculous events, and they say they believe in life after death. (36)
But far from indulging in the anthropological research Cook believes to be essential
to the provision of a correct answer to his query, he notices that Peter Winch is not even inclined 20
to listen to what religious believers say in the espousal and promotion of their beliefs, preferring
rather to provide what may appear to be the result of some kind of objective analysis of the role of
their pronouncements within the context of a social practice:
Here I only want to remark that how a term refers has to be understood
in the light of its actual application with its surrounding context in the life
of its users. I italicise ‘actual’ by way of contrasting what I am talking about
.............with what users of the term may be inclined to say about their
application of it if asked. (37)
But anyone who claims to believe, say , in a transcendent God who sent down his only
begotten Son to save the world from Sin, a God whose existence he believes he can inductively
demonstrate, is not likely to react kindly to being told that he does not really believe what he
knows himself to believe, and that what he actually is saying is doing no more than play a role
in his life of which, from his point of view, he is completely unaware. Cook understandably
introduces examples of evangelical approaches to religion in the course of arguing that Winch’s
viewpoint is totally misplaced, stressing instead that what a believer says he believes about God
and the scriptures is an essential element in what goes to constitute his faith.
Although there is indeed a genuine difference of opinion here, part of it rests on Cook’s
unwillingness to empathise with the kind of approach that sees mankind in Winch’s primitive
society looking upon the universe from the beginning with a deeply felt awe, a kind of reverence
from which specifically religious feelings and practices may gradually develop. From a perspective
of this kind, it is only natural to view belief as a form of social practice in which a child is inculcated
into religious ritual and observance via the same kind of teaching that enables him to talk about
his own feelings and those of others, and about the varying kinds of objects in the world around
him. In this context, what individuals may or may not say about their religious beliefs, if indeed
they are inclined to say anything at all, becomes incidental and insignificant relative to the kinds
of roles that Winch might be prepared to allocate to religious ritual in the lives of its participants.21
22
But this picture of a primitive society is already one in which the role of individual
decision in the matter of religious belief is understood to be incidental to the function of that
essentially collective practice in which the natives participate. It is hardly surprising, then,
that the very terms of reference governing Winch’s account should predispose him not only
to take the role of the practice in the lives of its participants to be of vastly more significance than
any individual interpretations that may be thought to be attributable to its believers about the
nature of their beliefs, but also that this role should be expressed within a specifically religious
language-game with its own criteria and rules.
It is patently obvious, however, that this picture cannot be directly applied to our
existing culture, in which religious belief is understood to be a matter for individual decision in
which the very interpretation placed upon the doctrines in which he believes is itself a crucial
factor affecting a person’s decision to participate in the practice itself. In a culture in which
religious belief is regarded primarily, although not exclusively as a matter for individual
decision, or perhaps when appropriate for conversion, not only can there be no single role for
religious doctrine, but the fact that the way in which an individual interprets the nature of belief
becomes a factor in his decision to believe, also rules out any tendency to think that there could
be a specifically religious language-game with its own rules and criteria. Here it is almost a
foregone conclusion that religious belief should be regarded not as a fundamental characteristic of
human life on a par with participation in the practice of talking about our own feelings and
those of others, or of referring to a world of physical objects of varying kinds, but as a matter
about which, by contrast, there is scope for personal choice in a way in which there can be no
scope for personal choice over the question of being a speaker of a public language within the
context of a social practice.
This suggests that whilst Winch’s natural tendency to regard religious practice
within his primitive societies as a fundamental characteristic of human life on a par with our
understanding of ourselves as persons inhabiting a common world, is actively encouraged
by his avowely anthropological perspective, this tendency ought to be resisted on philosophical
23
grounds. Because the anthropologist works against a background in which strictly philosophical
questions about the grounding of our understanding of ourselves as persons in a common
world do not arise, Winch’s approach to primitive societies tempts him to neglect the basic
distinction, central to our understanding of the nature of religious belief within our existing
culture, between those fundamental practices in which our participation cannot be a matter of
choice, and those - of which religious belief may be regarded as the very paradigm - in which
our participation is understood to be primarily a matter of personal commitment following an
assessment of relevant options - to include conversion - according to generally recognised criteria.
It is primarily because Cook concentrates upon those contexts in which religious belief
is plainly regarded as a commitment to a claim which its adherents take to be literally true in
some recognised (metaphysical) sense, that he finds Winch’s, and by implication Wittgenstein’s
approach to religion almost impossible to fathom. If, however, we see Cook and Winch coming
towards an understanding of religious belief from two entirely different directions, both of which
may be equally valid in different contexts, and neither of which could be given a philosophical
as distinct from a theological justification, we can obtain a more balanced assessment of what is
really important in both of their approaches.
Cook ends his discussion of religious belief with an account of O.K. Bouwsma’s
treatment of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, finding once again that both totally misconstrue the
language of the scriptures for their own ends, and by implication that Bouwsma in approving of
their accounts was equally misguided. Certainly, no one is more qualified than Cook to talk about
Bouwsma himself, because Cook was not only a graduate student of Bouwsma’s but actually
supervised Bouwsma’s output for intended publication. (38) The questions at stake in this chapter,
however, often centre on matters relating to the interpretation of scripture, and to the extent that
they do, their significance is theological rather than philosophical. We can gain a better appreciation
of Cook’s overall philosophical aim here by returning to the end of his previous chapter, where he
comes to pinpoint the central error in Wittgenstein’s treatment of religion:
24
A point to be aware of in all of this is that Wittgenstein lumped
the problem of religious belief together with the problems of ‘belief’
in other minds, in material objects, and in causation. (39)
Whilst one can understand why Cook should make this claim - because he takes
Wittgenstein throughout to be a neutral monist - it is just not true, as a detailed study of
Wittgenstein’s examples relating to privacy and to other minds clearly shows : his treatment of
these questions is not only distinct in its wholly philosophical approach, with its emphasis on
our becoming confused by pictures of inner and outer, but takes place in an entirely different context
from his treatment of ritual and religion which, often with anthropological overtones, surely had
an influence on the outlook of Peter Winch. What is more significant, however, is that the point
of view of his own that Cook then goes on to outline in opposition to Wittgenstein’s, appears to have
resonances which on any fairly conventional reading are themselves distinctly Wittgensteinian:
There is a serious error in comparing religious belief with
these other matters. In the non-religious cases the philosophical
problem arises only because philosophers have invented peculiar
entities of their own, such as Cartesian ‘bodies’ and ‘sense-data’.
In these cases we have come to see that the philosophers’ peculiar
entities are nothing more than products of confusion. And when we
dismiss those entities, it becomes obvious that it is inappropriate
to speak of our believing in other minds or believing in material
objects............In other words, the things people say in the ordinary,
nonreligious, course of affairs do not rest on metaphysical
beliefs, and in that sense we can say that they do not hold
metaphysical beliefs, whereas many people do, by contrast,
have religious beliefs. Although a realist account is not an
accurate account of the secular cases (other minds, physical objects),
25
a realist account is an accurate account of religious belief.
So Wittgensteinians, in rejecting a realist account, are wrong,
and that is why their account is rightly called ‘reductionist’. ( 40)
But whilst it would be more appropriate to say that there can be no single adequate account
of religious belief when belief is a function of the multivarious kinds of reasons and justifications
believers may be inclined to give for their beliefs either within or outwith different religious practices,
what may seem so extraordinary to the reader is that this passage is coming remarkably close to the
interpretation of Wittgenstein already provided in which he rejects as a confusion those ontological
dichotomies that Cook takes to be integral to Wittgenstein’s adherence to neutral monism. Or
perhaps it is not really so extraordinary after all, if we take it that Cook is now expressing his own
view, the view he once attributed to Wittgenstein in his earlier and much admired articles like
‘Human Beings’, but which he later came to think of as something he had only unjustifiably projected
onto the former object of his admiration. For, in coming to this realisation, as he admits earlier on in
his book, he saw that the views he had been granting to Wittgenstein were only what he had wanted to
understand him to be saying. (41)
So Cook ends by expounding views of his own which there is every reason to believe are
pointing in the same direction as Wittgenstein’s in his later writings, but which he finds it impossible
to apply to Wittgenstein himself. It would be oversimplistic to say that this results solely from his
having adopted a rather anachronistic approach to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass ; for in essence, a fuller
understanding of his position does require a detailed assessment of the two preceding volumes of
his commentary. But on the evidence provided here, it would be safe to say that in adopting a too
overtly philosophical approach to Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, he has ended by
criticising him in terms of his adherence to a picture of the inner and the outer, the mental and the
physical, and the private and the public that in his later writings Wittgenstein - and it would appear
Cook himself - is only too clearly at pains to regard as a source of philosophical confusion.
26
ENDNOTES(1) Cook, 412. (2) Cook, Ibid.(3) Cook, 419, Footnote 34.(4) Cook, 126, Footnote 27. (5) Cook, Ibid.(6) Cook, 127, Footnote 29. (7) Cora Diamond: ‘Does Bismarck Have a Beetle in His Box?’ in The New Wittgenstein,
(London: Routledge, 2000), 278 et seqq.(8) Cook, 116, Anthony Kenny: ’Criterion’, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards,
(New York: Macmillan, 1967), 260. (9) Cook, 117.(10) Cook, 119.(11) Cook, Ibid.(12) Cook, 32, M. & J. Hintikka: Investigating Wittgenstein, (Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1986), 247.(13) Cook, 408 et seq.(14) John W. Cook: Wittgenstein’s Metaphysics (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1994),
& Wittgenstein, Empiricism & Language (Oxford, O.U.P., 2000).(15) Cook, 55, Footnote 14.(16) Cook, 9.(17) Cook, Wittgenstein’s Metaphysics, Chapter 19, 316 et seqq.(18) Cook, Op. cit., Chapter 18, 307.(19) Cavell, 350. (20) Cook, 137 et seqq.(21) Cook, 142 et seq.(22) Cook Ibid.(23) Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963) trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Part II, xi, 219e.(24) Cook, 149.(25) Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Trans. Denis Paul & G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe
& G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969). (26) Cook, 252.(27) Ludwig Wittgenstein Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)
Chapter 6, ‘Conversations wih Wittgenstein’: M. O’ C Drury, 127.(28) Op. cit.,178.(29) Cook, 253.(30) Cook, 264 et seq.(31) Cook, Ibid.(32) Cook, Ibid.(33) Cook, Ibid.(34) But is this background arbitrary? Investigations, Part II, xii points to an alteration in certain
very general facts of nature underlying an alteration in our concepts. But if this requires an alteration in the laws of nature, then why should the existence of humanity continue to be presupposed? Insofar as we have an established causal framework, the idea of alterations to thelaws of nature makes little sense, and this grants them a special status in our thinking.
(35) Cook, 296.(36) Cook, 315.(37) Cook, 316. Peter Winch: ‘Meaning and Religious Language’, Reason and Religion,
ed. Stuart C. Brown, (New York: Cornell Uni. Press, 1977), 200.(38) John W. Cook: ‘Bouwsma on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Method’, Philosophical Investigations
Vol. 31, No.4, Oct. 2008.(39) Cook, 340.(40) Cook, Ibid.(41) Cook, 55 et seq.
27
As do most philosophers, Derek McDougall fondly remembers the publicationof his very first paper. This was in MIND in 1972. He has, however, continuedto worry whether Gilbert Ryle’s comment that “the matter is stated well andalmost interestingly” referred more to the quality of its treatment rather than toRyle’s aversion to the nature of its subject (religious belief). Other papers haveappeared in organs including PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICALRESEARCH and PHILOSOPHIA. His latest, on Wittgenstein, appears in the2008 edition of JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH.
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